Save farming by going back to nature, says agroecologist

Saturday

Mar 29, 2014 at 6:00 PM

Andre Gallant

Modern agriculture must divert from its present course, a prominent figure in the sustainable farming movement recently said in Athens.

Farming techniques today, with the use of fertilizers, tractors and pesticides, is often described as an improvement over what was once back-breaking labor performed by humans and animals, said Wes Jackson, founder and president of the Land Institute, a Kansas-based nonprofit promoting an ecological approach to agriculture.

But the full energy invested into industrial ag - board meetings, factories producing machinery, labs making fertilizer, transportation - paints a different picture. A "full cost accounting" of such a system "is impossible," Jackson said on Friday.

Jackson and the Land Institute are pioneers in the field of perennial polyculture, a way of growing plants organically without annual seedings, mimicking the natural ecosystem and its drought-tolerant, soil-conserving abilities - an agriculture with as little human intervention as possible.

Jackson's work has been featured in national magazines, and he delivered the annual Odum Environmental Ethics lecture at the University of Georgia Chapel in recognition of the 30th anniversary of the university's Environmental Ethics Certificate Program. The Willson Center for Humanities and Arts co-sponsored Jackson's lecture.

To save ourselves and our planet, we must include ecology, the "genius of the place," into agriculture, he said. Instead of relying on agronomy, which band-aids issues created by repetitive plowing and harvest cycles, we must consider agriculture itself as the problem and look to how Earth's natural system grows and maintains life. Humans have put technology before nature, and that must change, Jackson said.

Such a philosophy finds a practical application in perennial plants, Jackson said.

The Land Institute has devoted its efforts to developing an agriculture that acts like a prairie, a resilient system that harnesses the weed-fighting, nutrient-replenishing powers of its ecosystem.

The sustainable agriculture movement has put most of its energy behind vegetables grown at a small scale, but grains have been left out, Jackson said. Fly-over country, where he lives, grows much of the world's food, and it's grain heavy.

It took scientific development to begin the search for a perennial grain because heavy breeding is required, but new perennial strains of sorghum, wheat, rice, sunflowers and more have already been bred and are being tested.

"This is an investment, but it's not coming at a cost (to the soil)," Jackson said. "The only true economy is nature's ecology."